1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer networks and more particularly to sharing a physical port among a plurality of virtual bridges on a switch in a computer network.
2. Background Information
Many organizations, including businesses, governments and educational institutions, utilize computer networks so that employees and others may share and exchange information and/or resources. A computer network typically comprises a plurality of entities interconnected by means of one or more communications media. An entity may consist of any device, such as a computer, that “sources” (i.e., transmits) or “sinks” (i.e., receives) data frames over the communications media. A common type of computer network is a local area network (“LAN”) which typically refers to a privately owned network within a single building or campus. LANs typically employ a data communication protocol (LAN standard), such as Ethernet, or a wireless protocol, that defines the functions performed by data link and physical layers of a communications architecture (i.e., a protocol stack).
One or more intermediate network devices are often used to couple LANs together and allow the corresponding entities to exchange information. For example, a bridge may be used to provide a “switching” function between two or more LANs or end stations. Typically, the bridge is a computer and includes a plurality of ports that are coupled via LANs either to other bridges, or to end stations such as routers or host computers. Ports used to couple bridges to each other are generally referred to as trunk ports, whereas ports used to couple bridges to end stations are generally referred to as access ports. The bridging function includes receiving data from a sending entity at a source port and transferring that data to at least one destination port for forwarding to one or more receiving entities. Notably, a bridge may also be referred to as a “switch,” and both terms may be used interchangeably herein.
Spanning Tree Algorithm
Most computer networks include redundant communications paths so that a failure of any given link does not isolate any portion of the network. Such networks are typically referred to as meshed or partially meshed networks. The existence of redundant links, however, may cause the formation of circuitous paths or “loops” within the network. Loops are highly undesirable because data frames may traverse the loops indefinitely.
Furthermore, some devices, such as bridges or switches, replicate frames whose destination is not known resulting in a proliferation of data frames along loops. The resulting traffic can overwhelm the network. Other intermediate devices, such as routers, that operate at higher layers within the protocol stack, such as the Internetwork Layer of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (“TCP/IP”) reference model, deliver data frames and learn the addresses of entities on the network differently than most bridges or switches, such that routers are generally not susceptible to sustained looping problems.
To avoid the formation of loops, most bridges and switches execute a spanning tree protocol which allows them to calculate an active network topology that is loop-free (i.e., a tree) and yet connects every pair of LANs within the network (i.e., the tree is spanning). The IEEE promulgated a standard (presently IEEE Std. 802.1D-2004) that defines a spanning tree protocol to be executed by 802.1D compatible devices. In general, by executing the 802.1D spanning tree protocol, bridges elect a single bridge within the bridged network to be the “Root Bridge.” The 802.1D standard takes advantage of the fact that each bridge has a unique numerical identifier (bridge ID) by specifying that the Root Bridge is the bridge with the lowest bridge ID. In addition, for each LAN coupled to any bridge, exactly one port (the “Designated Port”) on one bridge (the “Designated Bridge”) is elected. The Designated Bridge is typically the one closest to the Root Bridge. All ports on the Root Bridge are Designated Ports, and the Root Bridge is the Designated Bridge on all the LANs to which it has ports.
Each non-Root Bridge also selects one port from among its non-Designated Ports (its “Root Port”) which gives the lowest cost path to the Root Bridge. The Root Ports and Designated Ports are selected for inclusion in the active topology and are placed in a forwarding state so that data frames may be forwarded to and from these ports and thus onto the LANs interconnecting the bridges and end stations of the network. Ports not included within the active topology are placed in a blocking state. When a port is in the blocking state, data frames will not be forwarded to or received from the port. A network administrator may also exclude a port from the spanning tree by placing it in a disabled state.
To obtain the information necessary to run the spanning tree protocol, bridges exchange special messages called configuration bridge protocol data unit (BPDU) messages or simply BPDUs. BPDUs carry information, such as assumed root and lowest root path cost, used in computing the active topology. More specifically, upon start-up, each bridge initially assumes itself to be the Root Bridge and transmits BPDUs accordingly. Upon receipt of a BPDU from a neighboring device, its contents are examined and compared with similar information (e.g., assumed root and lowest root path cost) stored by the receiving bridge in memory. If the information from the received BPDU is “better” than the stored information, the bridge adopts the better information and uses it in the BPDUs that it sends (adding the cost associated with the receiving port to the root path cost) from its ports, other than the port on which the “better” information was received. Although BPDUs are not forwarded by bridges, the identifier of the Root Bridge is eventually propagated to and adopted by all bridges as described above, allowing them to select their Root Port and any Designated Port(s).
In order to adapt the active topology to changes and failures, the Root Bridge periodically (e.g., every hello time) transmits BPDUs. In response to receiving BPDUs on their Root Ports, bridges transmit their own BPDUs from their Designated Ports, if any. Thus, BPDUs are periodically propagated throughout the bridged network, confirming the active topology. As BPDU information is updated and/or timed-out and the active topology is re-calculated, ports may transition from the blocking state to the forwarding state and vice versa. That is, as a result of new BPDU information, a previously blocked port may learn that it should be in the forwarding state (e.g., it is now the Root Port or a Designated Port).
Virtual Local Area Networks
A computer network may also be segmented into a series of logical networks. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,394,402, issued Feb. 28, 1995 to Ross (the “'402 Patent”), discloses an arrangement for associating any port of a switch with any particular network segment. Specifically, according to the '402 Patent, any number of physical ports of a particular switch may be associated with any number of groups within the switch by using a virtual local area network (VLAN) arrangement that virtually associates the port with a particular VLAN designation. More specifically, the switch or hub associates VLAN designations with its ports and further associates those VLAN designations with messages transmitted from any of the ports to which the VLAN designation has been assigned.
The VLAN designation for each port is stored in a memory portion of the switch such that every time a message is received on a given access port the VLAN designation for that port is associated with the message. Association is accomplished by a flow processing element which looks up the VLAN designation in the memory portion based on the particular access port at which the message was received. In many cases, it may be desirable to interconnect a plurality of these switches in order to extend the VLAN associations of ports in the network. Those entities having the same VLAN designation function as if they are all part of the same LAN. VLAN-configured bridges are specifically configured to prevent message exchanges between parts of the network having different VLAN designations in order to preserve the boundaries of each VLAN. Nonetheless, intermediate network devices operating above L2, such as routers, can relay messages between different VLAN segments.
In addition to the '402 Patent, the IEEE promulgated the 802.1Q specification standard for Virtual Bridged Local Area Networks. To preserve VLAN associations of messages transported across trunks or links in VLAN-aware networks, both Ross and the IEEE Std. 802.1Q-2005 specification standard disclose appending a VLAN identifier (VID) field to the corresponding frames. In addition, U.S. Pat. No. 5,742,604 to Edsall et al. (the “'604 patent”), which is commonly owned with the present application, discloses an Interswitch Link (ISL) encapsulation mechanism for efficiently transporting packets or frames, including VLAN-modified frames, between switches while maintaining the VLAN association of the frames. In particular, an ISL link, which may utilize the Fast Ethernet standard, connects ISL interface circuitry disposed at each switch. The transmitting ISL circuitry encapsulates the frame being transported within an ISL header and ISL error detection information, while the ISL receiving circuitry strips off this information and recovers the original frame.
Notably, the IEEE Std. 802.1Q-2005 supports the creation of up to 4K, i.e., 4096, different VLANs or “broadcast domains” within a given network, and, notably, allows up to 4K VLANs to operate on each link. However, in some network designs, it is desirable to create more than 4K broadcast domains. For example, very large Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) (e.g., or a service provider's Metro Ethernet services) can be created using L2 technology. These very large MANs may be used to provide communication services to hundreds or thousands of different customers. To keep the traffic from different customers separated, the MAN needs to establish more than 4K broadcast domains. The creation of large numbers of broadcast domains, however, may pose problems for the operation of the Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol, described below. Accordingly, a system that can utilize the Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol, and can also support a very large number of broadcast domains is described in commonly-owned copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/416,559, entitled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR RUNNING A MULTIPLE SPANNING TREE PROTOCOL WITH A VERY LARGE NUMBER OF DOMAINS, filed on May 3, 2006 by Khan et al., the contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference in their entirety. As discussed in detail therein, bridge domains (BDs) may be used to define a broadcast domain that is similar to a VLAN. By switching/bridging based on the bridge domains (e.g., up to 16K BDs), the limitation of 4K VLANs may be overcome. Other techniques may be available to overcome the 4K VLAN limitation, as will be understood by those skilled in the art, and the bridge domains are merely one representative example.
Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol
Within the IEEE Std. 802.1Q-2005, the IEEE also included a specification standard for a Spanning Tree Protocol that is specifically designed for use with networks that support VLANs. The Multiple Spanning Tree (MST) Protocol (MSTP), which is described in the IEEE Std. 802.1Q-2005, organizes a bridged network into regions. Within each region, MSTP establishes an Internal Spanning Tree (IST) which provides connectivity to all bridges within the respective region and to the ISTs established within other regions. The IST established within each MSTP Region also provides connectivity to the one Common Spanning Tree (CST) established outside of the MSTP regions by IEEE Std. 802.1Q-2005 compatible bridges running STP or RSTP. The IST of a given MST Region receives and sends BPDUs to the CST. Accordingly, all bridges of the bridged network are connected by a single Common and Internal Spanning Tree (CIST). From the point of view of the legacy or IEEE Std. 802.1Q-2005 bridges, moreover, each MST Region appears as a single virtual bridge on the CST.
Within each MST Region, the MSTP compatible bridges establish a plurality of active topologies, each of which is called a Multiple Spanning Tree Instance (MSTI). The MSTP bridges also assign or map each VLAN to one and only one of the MSTIs. Because VLANs may be assigned to different MSTIs, frames associated with different VLANs can take different paths through an MSTP Region. The bridges may, but typically do not, compute a separate topology for every single VLAN, thereby conserving processor and memory resources. Each MSTI is basically a simple RSTP instance that exists only inside the respective Region, and the MSTIs do not interact outside of the Region.
MSTP, like the other spanning tree protocols, uses BPDUs to establish the ISTs and MSTIs as well as to define the boundaries of the different MSTP Regions. The bridges do not send separate BPDUs for each MSTI. Instead, every MSTP BPDU carries the information needed to compute the active topology for all of the MSTIs defined within the respective Region. Each MSTI, moreover, has a corresponding Identifier (ID) and the MSTI IDs are encoded into the bridge IDs. That is, each bridge has a unique ID, as described above, and this ID is made up of a fixed portion and a settable portion. With MSTP, the settable portion of a bridge's ID is further organized to include both a settable priority component and a system ID extension. The system ID extension corresponds to the CIST or one of the MSTI IDs. The MSTP compatible bridges within a given Region will thus have a different bridge ID for the CIST and each MSTI. For a given MSTI, the bridge having the lowest bridge ID for that instance is elected the root. Thus, an MSTP compatible bridge may be the root for one MSTI but not another within a given MSTP Region.
Each bridge running MSTP also has a single MST Configuration Identifier (ID) that consists of three attributes: an alphanumeric configuration name, a revision level and a VLAN mapping table that associates each of the potential 4096 VLANs to a corresponding MSTI. Each bridge, moreover loads its MST Configuration ID into the BPDUs sourced by the bridge. Because bridges only need to know whether or not they are in the same MST Region, they do not propagate the actual VLAN-to-MSTI tables in their BPDUs. Instead, the MST BPDUs carry only a digest of the VLAN to MSTI table or mappings. The digest is generated by applying the well-known MD-5 algorithm to the VLAN to MSTI table. When a bridge receives an MST BPDU, it extracts the MST Configuration ID contained therein, including the digest, and compares it with its own MST Configuration ID to determine whether it is in the same MST Region as the bridge that sent the MST BPDU. If the two MST Configuration IDs are the same, then the two bridges are in the same MST Region. If, however, the two MST Configuration IDs have at least one non-matching attribute, i.e., either different configuration names, different revision levels and/or different computed digests, then the bridge that received the BPDU concludes that it is in a different MST Region than the bridge that sourced the BPDU. A port of an MST bridge, moreover, is considered to be at the boundary of an MST Region if the Designated Bridge is in a different MST Region or if the port receives legacy BPDUs.
Virtual Bridges
Spanning Tree Protocols (STPs) generally send a single control message (BPDU) for each physical port (link/interface). As such, the states of any configured VLANs of the network (e.g., up to 4K VLANs as in 802.1Q) all depend on the topology computed by the use of this single BPDU. In the case of STP and Rapid STP (RSTP), a single topology is computed in the whole network (the L2 domain), and all configured VLANs are implicitly mapped to this topology. In the MST Protocol (MSTP), however, several topologies may be computed, and the configured VLANs are explicitly mapped to a given topology (an MST instance). Because of this explicit mapping, MST Protocols must maintain a knowledge of the existence of all the configured VLANs (e.g., up to 4K), and it becomes relatively complex to support more and more VLANs in this manner (e.g., greater than 4K).
Virtual bridges offer a clean and simple solution to the existence of greater numbers of VLANs (e.g., greater than 4K) in a network, particularly for MST Protocol networks. In particular, a switch may be split into several instances of virtual bridges, where each virtual bridge operates (in the control plane) as though it were a separate physical switch/bridge. Accordingly, virtual bridges may be used to support more than 4K VLANs on a single switch, as each virtual bridge may separately support up to 4K VLANs.
FIGS. 1A and 1B are schematic block diagrams of virtual bridges not sharing a physical port in a data plane view and a control plane view, respectively. For instance, in FIG. 1A, a switch 102a may have two virtual bridges 103a and 103b, each assigned its own set of VLANs (e.g., 1a-4096a for virtual bridge 103a and 1b-4096b for virtual bridge 103b). Physical port/interface 110a interconnects the switch 102a (i.e., virtual bridge 103a) to a second switch 102b, which may be configured to support VLANs 1a-4096a. Physical port/interface 110b interconnects the switch 102a (i.e., virtual bridge 103b) to a third switch 102c, which may be configured to support VLANs 1b-4096b. In this manner, switch 102a is configured to support 8K VLANs (8192 VLANs), due to the separate virtual bridges 103a and 103b. In FIG. 1B, the control plane view may be seen, where each virtual bridge 103 appears as a separate switch/bridge within the network.
Notably, a virtual bridge may be configured with a plurality of attached physical ports. However, each physical port (or interface) of a switch is conventionally assigned (e.g., manually) to only a single virtual bridge. Specifically, this limitation currently prevents a switch from mixing VLANs (and bridge domains) belonging to different virtual bridges on the same port. There remains a need, therefore, for a technique that allows a physical port to be shared among a plurality of virtual bridges, particularly a technique that complies with current standards, e.g., as set forth in 802.1Q and 802.1D.